VS 2013 Bower EMALFORMED bower.json

Question

I'm trying to use Bower on Visual Studio 2013 (Update 5) along with Grunt, using the Task Runner explorer. I've previously used Bower on its own so the whole set-up looked rather straightforward.
However, when using the following bower.json:

{
    "name": "sample",
    "private": true,
    "dependencies": {
        "jquery-validation-unobtrusive": "*"
    }
}

I get the following error, note that the unexpected token seems to be blank (this is not a copy-paste issue):

Executing  

bower                       EMALFORMED Failed to read C:\Directory\bower.json

Additional error details:
Unexpected token

The JSON seems to be valid, what could the issue be?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

The problem is the same as in this question or this question: Visual Studio is writing a byte order mark, an invisible unicode character, to the beginning of the document.

To resolve the issue you can either use a different editor or change the file saving setting to exclude the symbol.

To do the latter, choose File - Advanced Save Options and choose Unicode (UTF-8 without signature) - Codepage 65001 as the encoding.

VS 2013 Bower EMALFORMED bower.json

1 Answers1